Learning How to Dynamically Route Autonomous Vehicles on Shared Roads

Road congestion induces significant costs across the world, and road network disturbances, such as traffic accidents, can cause highly congested traffic patterns. If a planner had control over the routing of all vehicles in the network, they could easily reverse this effect. In a more realistic scenario, we consider a planner that controls autonomous cars, which are a fraction of all present cars. We study a dynamic routing game, in which the route choices of autonomous cars can be controlled and the human drivers react selfishly and dynamically to autonomous cars' actions. As the problem is prohibitively large, we use deep reinforcement learning to learn a policy for controlling the autonomous vehicles. This policy influences human drivers to route themselves in such a way that minimizes congestion on the network. To gauge the effectiveness of our learned policies, we establish theoretical results characterizing equilibria on a network of parallel roads and empirically compare the learned policy results with best possible equilibria. Moreover, we show that in the absence of these policies, high demands and network perturbations would result in large congestion, whereas using the policy greatly decreases the travel times by minimizing the congestion. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that employs deep reinforcement learning to reduce congestion by influencing humans' routing decisions in mixed-autonomy traffic.